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George Washington 



An Address Delivered Before the 

Legislature of New Jersey^ 

February 22, J 92 1 



By 
DAVID HUNTER ^ILLER 












LIBf^ARY OF CONGRESS 
RECEIVED 

JUL101922 



"GEORGE WASHINGTON" 

An Address Delivered Before the Legislature of New Jersey, 
February 22, 1921 

By DAVID HUNTER MILLER. 

Naught need be said by me of the honor of addressing 
this assemblage on such an occasion, since the occasion 
itself is so much more important than any honor; for this 
is one of those few dates which are graven on the heart 
of every American; a day on which it is, indeed, fitting 
that even the legislative assembly of a great State should 
turn aside from its deliberations to consider the days 
gone by, to think of the foundations of the Republic and 
of the great men who laid those foundations upon which 
the noble structure of our country has been erected. 

And when I say "great men," we are thinking prin- 
cipally of that leader who stood head and shoulders above 
them all; for the difficulties that confronted the leader 
of America when America began, were such that they 
could never have been solved except by the genius of 
George Washington. 

It would be vain for anyone to attempt in these few 
minutes even to enumerate the achievements of the first 
President of the United States; but it may not be out 
of place for me to seek to paint a picture of those cir- 
cumstances which surrounded that task which he com- 
menced, a task which he not only commenced but car- 
ried on, through evil report and through good report, and 
which he brought to its noble conclusion. And surely I 
shall not weary you by recounting circumstances that are 
familiar, for when we Americans think of George Wash- 
ington, we are like little children, longing to hear again 
a w^ell known story often told before. 



And for the painting of such a picture what place more 
appropriate could be found than this very city — a city 
which has given its name to that Battle of Trenton which 
was one of the striking proofs of the military audacity 
and imagination of a commander who had been criticized 
by the ignorant as being too cautious or too hesitant. 
Yes, without that Christmas Night of 1776 in Trenton, 
February 22nd would not have been the day in history 
that we now find it; for the battle of Trenton was the 
turning point in Washington's career and was the turn- 
ing point in the War of Independence. 

So let us think here for a little just what these United 
States were at that time when, indeed, their independence 
had been declared in a great paper by Thomas Jefferson, 
but before the writing on that paper had been translated 
into a greater fact by George Washington. 

Our country was a little strip of territory stretching 
along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Georgia, with a 
few settlements here and there, connected by roads which 
were often hardly more than trails, with a population 
less in number than the army which we raised three years 
ago, with few industries, poor and feeble in everything 
except her rich gifts from nature and the powerful quality 
of her manhood. 

The ocean on our east seemed closed to us; our coasts 
were undefended; we had no navy; our ports were at 
the mercy of the British; and our commerce had been 
swept from the seas. 

And what were our other surroundings? To the west, a 
vast wilderness, peopled by savages and owned, if owned 
at all, by Europe; our southern frontiers touched those 
of Great Britain, and on the north, too, was the enemy. 

Such was the country of George Washington, such were 



the circumstances which he faced when he set his hand 
to the plough. What hope was there for such a nation, 
struggling against a wealthy and a great power for free- 
dom from dominion from without? Nothing, I answer, 
but the hope of an ideal, the ideal that Lincoln phrased 
in another crisis of our history when he said: 

"that government of the people, by the people, for 
the people shall not perish from the earth." 

For a belief in an ideal is so much stronger than any 
material thing. Nothing in history perhaps better illus- 
trates this truth than the eight years' struggle of the War 
of Independence; every material circumstance was against 
the side of Washington; his troops were always fewer in 
number than those of his adversaries; tlie treasury was 
always bankrupt; the system of army administration un- 
der the Continental Congress was incredibly inefficient; 
it resulted as every American knows in such miseries as 
those of Valley Forge; indeed, the whole conduct of af- 
fairs by the government of that day was a ghastly failure; 
the very structure of the government itself was unwork- 
able; its form almost forbade it to function and, indeed, 
often it did not function at all. 

Perhaps all this was inevitable under the conditions 
then existing; for most of our forbears did not think of 
themselves as Americans but rather as New Jerseymen 
or New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians; scarcely did the burn- 
ing misery of those years suffice to convince the people 
of the necessity of the fusion of those separated communi- 
ties into a nation; but what is unbelievable in the picture 
is that the country could even make a pretence of going 
on with a war under conditions of disorganization which 
amounted at times to chaos or worse. 

Certainly nothing would have been even remotely pos- 



sible if it had not been for the central figure of that 
leader, \\ith that ideal of freedom in his soul when he 
raised a standard to which the wise and the honest might 
repair; but the people who followed that standard rightly 
personilled it in their leader — with Washington they 
would have liberty and witliout him they would have 
nothing. 

For notliing can explain the War of Independence but 
Washington himself; I know that it was the French Alli- 
ance which finally made Nictory certain; we have never 
forgotten it, we remembered it in 1918 and we will re- 
member it again if need be; but without Washington 
there would have been no thought even of a French Alli- 
ance in 1778, If the War of Independence be looked at 
from any point of view other than the personality of 
George Washington, it becomes an impossibility', it be- 
comes not a war which would have ended differently, but 
a war which would never have been fought at all, a war 
which would have died aborning and would have been 
remembered only as an unimportant rebellion. 

Even with Washington, while the impossible becomes 
a reality, it remains to anyone who reads the chronicles 
of those times a reality which is real only because it ac- 
tually did happen; the impossibility is contradicted but 
not explained by the fact; and we find the only explana- 
tion in that indefinable quality of leadership which George 
W^ashington possessed in supreme degree; a leadership 
which was based not on partj', not on opinions, not on 
eloquence, not even on magnetism, but on character; his 
honesty of thought, his singleness of purpose and his 
courage of soul were so clearly the servants of his love 
of freedom that men followed Washington because they 
believed in liberty and believed in liberty because they 
followed Washington. 



Where, where but in America, could such a man be 
found, commanding the armies of his country for eight 
long weary years, seeing his home but once in all that 
time, refusing ail pay for his services, and at the end of 
the war laying down his rank 

"As 'twere a careless trifle," 

and saying simply to his officers as he told them good-by 
with tears in his eyes: 

"I now take leave of you, most devoutly wishing 
that your latter days may be as prosperous and 
happy as your former ones have been glorious and 
honorable." 

Well, their task was finished, perhaps, but his, thank 
God, was not. For the United States were in a more des- 
perate plight after the peace than they had been during 
the war. The conditions that then existed here remind 
one more of the present chaos in parts of Eastern Europe 
than of anything else known to modern times. Any gov- 
ernmental authority was almost non-existent. The cur- 
rency in circulation was worthless. The bitterness be- 
tween different parts of the country threatened not only 
division but even civil war. If no remedy could be found 
the country might far better have remained under the 
rule of Great Britain. 

Only upon one thing was the country agreed and that 
was that there must be a change. For four years after 
the close of the war the United States had gone along 
the road that led to ruin, and the only result of that cer- 
tainty of approaching disaster was the feeble conclusion 
that delegates of the states should meet to amend the 
Articles of Confederation, a meeting that seemed doomed 
to failure in advance; for unanimity was necessary and 



6 



unanimity in such a gathering was impossible except as 
to one thing, namely, that George Washington should 
be its presiding otlicer. Again, without George Waslihig- 
ton, we would have had no country. 

During the months that he presided over the delibera- 
tions of that Convention, only once did he make a sug- 
gestion as to its work; but under the spell of his per- 
sonality, under the magic that compelled success when 
George Washington led, the Convention was brought to 
do, not what it was supposed to do, to amend the Articles 
of Confederation, but to write an entirely new Constitu- 
tion to be submitted to the people of the United States. 

Only with such a leader could such a stroke have been 
attempted; only with the name of George Washington at 
the head of the list of signatures to that paper, could tlie 
statesmen of that day, contrary to their instructions, have 
dared to propose to the people of the United States a 
new form of government, to submit, not amendments, but 
a Constitution. 

While that document has since compelled the wonder 
of an admiring world, it was none the less attacked upon 
its publication with a bitterness and a virulence unsur- 
passed and perhaps unequalled in the history of politics. 
The opposition to it was in part ignorant but none the 
less real. Many people, a very large minority at least, 
really believed that the Constitution of the United States 
would prove the destruction of all liberty; every possible 
evil in the way of militarism, of extravagance, of des- 
potism, was attributed to it. 

We may, of course, smile at those predictions now but 
they were no laughing matter for the country then. If 
the Constitution had not been adopted, it is certain that 
the States would not have stayed together; and the ex- 



periment of trying the Constitution would not have had 
the remotest chance of success except with George Wash- 
ington as the first President of the United States. 

Indeed, it is the developments of this period which 
perhaps show most clearly the extraordinary place filled 
by Washington in the life of America. He had presided 
over the Convention which had proposed the Constitu- 
tion; that document had become the storm centre of the 
political disputes of the day. But the opponents of the 
paper, such men as Patrick Henry, for example, not only 
admitted that Washington was the only man for the presi- 
dency under that new regime which they abhorred, but 
^even insisted that Washington's acceptance of the presi- 
dency was the only thing which could possibly reconcile 
them even to a trial of the new system. 

What would we think of a political situation in which 
two great parties whose principles and ideas were not 
only radically different but wholly contradictory, each 
insisted and unanimously insisted that one and the same 
man should be their candidate for the presidency; a situa- 
tion, moreover, in which that candidate was unanimously 
chosen and had in his cabinet the chiefs of those two 
sichools of thought? Yet that was the situation which 
existed in the administration of George Washington. 

No one will deny that Alexander Hamilton and Thomas 
Jefferson were great men — each of them has left his mark 
upon the history of his country, yes, and of the world. In 
their day, those men were the leaders of the two great 
political parties. What shall we say then of George Wash- 
ington, above all party, the unanimous choice of both 
parties for the Chief Magistracy, and having in his cabinet 
at the same time those two opposite political leaders, one 
as Secretary of State, the other as Secretary of the 
Treasury? 



8. 



Now all of this is so well known to us that we have 
ceased to marvel at it. We have invented stories about 
the chcrn- tree and the hatchet when nothing could be 
invented which could approach the reality of the wonder 
of the man who brought America into existence, the 
Father of his Country. 

Time fails me to speak of the record of eight years of 
office, that period of the beginning of the new era, of 
Washington's refusal of re-election, of his farewell mes- 
sage to the people whom he so loved, and of that short 
period of repose at Mount Vernon before he was laid to 
rest there in that shrine so sacred to us all, a shrine from 
which I have never seen an American turn away but with 
tears. 

And now, perchance, some one will say to me, will you 
not frame from that career some message for our present 
time? Will you not draw from that life some lesson 
for this day? And I answer, no. For if there be an 
American — surely there is none here — ^but if there be 
an American who is not inspired by the very thought of 
Washington, who is not moved by the associations of this 
day to a new devotion to the ideals of his country, to a 
new insistence on the supremacy of the public good over 
the mere aims of party, to a new belief that America shall 
continue as the leader of the world into the light of a 
new dawn, no words of mine can avail. 

You have all seen in the Capital City that towering shaft 
of marble raised unto the heavens on the site that he him- 
self chose, a monument to George Washington, a beau- 
tiful symbol of his overshadowing fame. But his real 
monument is the empire that has joined together the At- 
lantic and the Pacific, that reaches from Maine to Cali- 
fornia, from Florida to Oregon, from the sands of the Rio 



i 



I 



Grande to the snows of the frozen north, the Republic 
that has kept despotism from this hemisphere for a 
century, that has granted a new day to ten millions of 
Filipinos, that made a present of her freedom to Cuba, 
yes, that broke forever the tide of tyranny in Europe, the 
nation of a hundred million freemen that stands and will 
always stand for liberty, for justice and for peace. 

And while on such a day as this we cannot but think of 
the past, and while we think of that past as the founda- 
tion of the greatness of the present, let us also consider 
the days to come; let us cast our vision forward to the 
unending vistas of the future, adown those centuries which 
we may look but never see, when the name of George 
Washington will still remain as now, the name of him who 
was first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of 
his countrymen, and when those who come after us will 
look back alike at our glorious present and at those early 
days of the Republic as being together but the beginning 
of her eternal youth. 



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